R itik Malhotra remembers sprinting through a San Francisco rainstorm in 2014, desperate to reach the post office before it closed. The 21-year-old UC Berkeley dropout had recently sold his cloud-storage startup, Stream, to Box, a deal that netted him more than $20 million. But managing his new fortune still meant mailing physical documents to his financial advisor.

“I went from being a broke college dropout to having a life-changing amount of money,” said Malhotra, now 34. “My parents didn't come from wealth. I needed to find someone to help me be responsible.”

At the time, robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront were gaining traction by offering a cheaper, automated alternative to traditional financial advice. But suddenly responsible for more money than he knew what to do with, Malhotra was gripped by an anxiety he compared to the fear of facing a health crisis. His investors suggested he find a financial advisor.

Malhotra valued human advice, but the processes surrounding it felt stuck in the past. Over the next six years, he spoke to his own wealth manager and more than 100 others and found that paperwork, disconnected software and scattered meeting notes had dominated much of their work.

In 2021, he launched Savvy Wealth to give advisors AI software that could take on more of the work behind the scenes. Its agents can pull from a client’s investments, financial plan and meeting history to analyze portfolios, run planning scenarios and update records for the advisor to review. Savvy now has roughly 150 advisors managing more than $8 billion, up from just over $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, and has raised more than $100 million over the last five years and is valued at $210 million, according to PitchBook.

The growth of artificial intelligence has put the would-be dinosaurs of wealth management– who employ hundreds of thousands of financial advisors and are responsible for $330 plus trillion in assets–on notice. In fact, when California’s fintech startup Altruist announced an AI tax planning feature that would be integrated into their advisor desktop in February, a sell-off caused the market value of several publicly traded wealth managers and platforms to plummet by more than $140 billion. [Altruist has since been acquired by Vanguard Group for an estimated $5 billion ]

Altruist and Savvy are part of a growing number of tech startups looking to empower financial advisors, rather than replace them. Currently, financial advisors spend only about half their time with their clients, according to Renaud Fages, partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group. The rest of their time is eaten up by meeting prep and administrative work. Fages estimates AI could cut that work in half, allowing advisors to spend as much as 75% of their time advising clients. BCG estimates the AI startups, designed to assist financial advisors, could capture as much as $20 billion in annual software spending by wealth managers in the U.S.

Parker Ence, cofounder and CEO of Salt Lake City, Utah-based Jump, and Mark Gilbert, cofounder and CEO of San Francisco-based Zocks, run two such firms betting that AI can automate much of the tedious but necessary work advisors do. Both founded in 2022, the companies connect to software advisors already use, then use AI to prepare meeting briefs, take notes, update client records and draft follow-up emails. Jump has raised over $100 million and is used by more than 35,000 financial advisors. Zocks, used by more than 5,000 firms, has raised $65 million, including a $45 million Series B in January led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors. Jump and Zocks were recently valued at $525 million and $266 million, respectively, according to PitchBook.

“Five minutes after my meeting, my assistant has a draft (follow up) email ready for me to review, the notes are in our CRM and I have a succinct list of tasks,” says Zocks customer and cofounder of Apollon Wealth Management Robert Gorman. “10% to 15% of an advisor’s administrative time has been given back to them. That allows for deeper client connectivity, extra time to find new assets, mental well-being or new revenue generation.”

Jump’s AI, which is accessible via a Chrome browser extension or app, goes a step further in helping advisors up their game professionally by creating a “best practices” feedback loop. Says Ence of his startup’s “Jump Grow” feature, “Our AI will review the meeting after you're done talking with the client and basically tell you, ‘Hey this is what went well, and this is what the best advisors in your firm would normally do in this situation.’”

At larger firms, information about a single client can be spread across different systems holding their investment accounts, insurance policies, loans, financial plan and meeting history. New York-based Avantos connects that information so its AI agents can flag what an advisor should do next. If a client has a new baby, for example, the software might suggest discussing a 529 plan or updating a will, says cofounder Bassam Chaptini. For customers like Mercer Advisors and Guardian Life, Chaptini says the software has increased the number of clients an advisor can serve by as much as 30%.

“These are very conservative buyers traditionally, but we're at a very different point in AI adoption today than we were two years ago,” says Bessemer Venture Partners’ Eric Kaplan, who led Avantos’ $25 million Series A in July 2025. “Every single boardroom is asking how they can adopt AI in the way that's most appropriate for their business.”

AI is also moving into more specialized parts of financial advice. New York-based Luminary helps advisors figure out what would happen to a client’s money if they died today, says cofounder and former AllianceBernstein exec David Barnard. Its software uses OpenAI models to read documents like wills and trusts, combines them with information about the client’s assets and creates a visual map of how the estate would be distributed.

“What somebody really cares about is, 'Are my kids going to be okay?’” says Barnard. “Those are the most important things for high net worth clients that no advisor had a toolkit to answer in any kind of responsive way, let alone proactive.”

Moment, founded in New York in 2022, helps advisors decide how to change a client’s investment portfolio. Advisors can give its AI agents a client’s holdings and describe what they want to change, such as increasing diversification or reducing concentration in a single stock. The agents interpret the request, while Moment’s software calculates which investments to buy and sell while accounting for taxes and the firm’s investment rules. A human approves the trades before anything happens.

Even as AI moves beyond administrative tasks and into the analytical work at the heart of financial advice, BCG’s Fages doesn’t expect it to replace the advisor. He says client engagement and empathy will matter even more as the job becomes less technical.

“The currency is trust,” says Fages. “You have a lot of people with money that just don’t know enough, don’t want to know, or don’t want to spend the time to know and need some validation from others.”

Even if AI fails to replace the financial advisor, it could drastically reduce support staff. Waypoint West, a budding wealth management firm based in San Francisco, is an early example of advisors adopting a DIY approach using AI. Siblings Haley and Brooks Schaffer launched Waypoint in 2025 after stints at BlackRock, ICONIQ Capital and Alkeon Capital. Frustrated that even small changes to Salesforce could take four to six weeks, they built their own CRM over a weekend using Airtable and Anthropic’s Claude. Now, when they want to track something new about a client, they can add it to the system and search old meeting notes to fill in the data within an hour.

Nearly a year after launching, Waypoint West is still run solely by the duo, who together manage assets for six ultra-high net worth families. Schaffer says work like analyzing a prospective client’s portfolio and putting together the supporting research would have required a full-time analyst at a traditional firm. “In the old world pre-AI, there is no world in which Brooks and I would be running our business without having hired somebody at this point,” she says.

But Schaffer sees a bigger upside than simply operating with fewer people. She thinks AI could help Waypoint West win the next generation of wealthy clients.

“The next gen cares about how wealth impacts their life and the way they spend their time,” she says. “I can very quickly put together something that is completely customized to that person, and I can do it at scale because of AI.”